# ReCoGNet: Recurrent Context-Guided Network for 3D MRI Prostate Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19687 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19687/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Prostate gland segmentation from T2-weighted MRI is a critical yet challenging task in clinical prostate cancer assessment. While deep learning-based methods have significantly advanced automated segmentation, most conventional approaches-particularly 2D convolutional neural networks (CNNs)-fail to leverage inter-slice anatomical continuity, limiting their accuracy and robustness. Fully 3D models offer improved spatial coherence but require large amounts of annotated data, which is often impractical in clinical settings. To address these limitations, we propose a hybrid architecture that models MRI sequences as spatiotemporal data. Our method uses a deep, pretrained DeepLabV3 backbone to extract high-level semantic features from each MRI slice and a recurrent convolutional head, built with ConvLSTM layers, to integrate information across slices while preserving spatial structure. This combination enables context-aware segmentation with improved consistency, particularly in data-limited and noisy imaging conditions. We evaluate our method on the PROMISE12 benchmark under both clean and contrast-degraded test settings. Compared to state-of-the-art 2D and 3D segmentation models, our approach demonstrates superior performance in terms of precision, recall, Intersection over Union (IoU), and Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), highlighting its potential for robust clinical deployment.